cannot boot in xp pro

[tdhart]

i turned my pc on this morning and got a screen with this message:

Windows could not start because the following file is missing or corrupt:
\system32\hal.dll.
Please reinstall a copy of the above file.

Does anybody have any ideas on what I can do. I tried putting the winxp pro setup cd in and reboot, but I dont get a menu to recover with.

[Mesaeus]

Is your pc booting from the cd ? If not, you'll have to enter the bios setup and change the boot order to cdrom first. If the boot order is right, what kind of error message does it give ? Does Windows setup crash ?

In any case, if you can get into the setup, press enter to do a new install, it should detect your previous installation and give you the option to do a repair install, which will preserve your installed programs. Note that on the first screen in setup you can press "R", but this is for a repair console, which is useless in your case.

The reason why this is happening can be your hard disk failing, so if it's making strange noises or the repair install doesn't work either, take the drive out of the pc and put it as slave in another windows xp pc, start copying any important files and hope you're on time.

[tdhart]

I put the setup cdrom in and it goes through bios and ask me to boot from cdrom and then ask me to hit any key...in which i do but it doesnt recognize my keyboard response it just goes through booting from hd. I tried making a floppy xp boot disk and when it ask me to put in #2 and hit enter i do, but nothing happens.

[tdhart]

does it matter if the keyboard is usb or ps2?

[Mesaeus]

If you have an USB keyboard, you need to enable "USB keyboard" support in the BIOS setup. Look for those two words or a variant of them. If not enabled, you will be able to use a USB keyboard in Windows, but not in dos or even the bios setup itself. If this setting is off and you have a USB keyboard, you might be unable to enter the BIOS setup to change the value. In that case, borrow/steal/beg a ps/2 keyboard from someone else to change that value. These days the setting is on by default, but there was a time period where the foolish bios manufacturers put it off by default, thereby generating lotsa problems for people with USB keyboards